Which real-world university employed J.R.R. Tolkien as a professor of Anglo-Saxon?

The University of Oxford employed J.R.R. Tolkien as a professor of Anglo-Saxon.

Tolkien became Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford in 1925, teaching Old English and related subjects. In 1945 he moved to the Merton Professorship of English Language and Literature, a position he held until his retirement in 1959.

His academic career strongly influenced his fiction. Tolkien was a specialist in medieval languages and literature, and his work on texts such as Beowulf informed the atmosphere, vocabulary, and heroic traditions of Middle-earth. His 1936 lecture “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” became especially influential in literary studies.

Tolkien had studied at Oxford and remained connected with the university for much of his professional life. Cambridge was also home to Tolkien later, because he served as Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Leeds earlier in his career, but Oxford is the institution most closely associated with his professorships.